And Bert's tikes had drove him mad with their playful antics. He said he'd be set down for a bite of dinner and one of 'em would climb up his back and feel his hair—not saying a word, just taking hold of it; then it would jump down and another would climb up and do the same thing, and him not daring to defend himself. He'd got so worked up he was afraid to stay on the place.
"And you know," he says—"what I can't understand—danged if Bert don't seem to kind of like 'em. You may think I'm a liar, but he waited for one the other morning when it squealed at him and kept a hold of its hand clean down to the hay barn. What do you think of that? And besides these that go round infesting the place outside he's got a short yearling and a long two-year-old that have to be night-herded. I listened to 'em every night. One yelled and strangled all last night, till I s'posed, of course, it was going to perish everlastingly; but here this morning it was acting like nothing at all had happened.
"All I can say is, Bert don't have much luck. And that littlest yeller always unswallowing its meals with no effort whatever! It's horrible! And the mother, with no strength of character—feeble-minded, I reckon—coddles 'em! She never did cuss 'em out proper or act human toward 'em. Kids like them, what they need—upside down and three quick hard ones. I know!"
I was fool enough to argue with him a bit, trying to see if he didn't have a lick of sense. I told him to look how happy Bert was; and how his family had made a man of him, him getting more money and saving more than ever in his past life. Homer said what good would all that money do him? He'd only fool it away on his wife and children.
"He regrets it, all right," says Homer. "I says to myself the other day:
'I bet a cookie he'd like to be carefree and happy like me!'"
Homer was a piker, even when he made bets with himself. And the short of it was I sent a man that didn't hate children over to Bert's and kept Homer on the place here.
He stayed three months and said it was heaven, account of not having them unnecessary evils on the place that would squirm round a man's legs and feel of his hair and hide round corners and peek at him and whisper about him. Then I changed foremen and Scott Humphrey, the new one, brought three towheads with him of an age to cause Homer the anguish of the damned, which they done on the first day they got here by playing that he was a horse and other wild animals, and trying to pull the rest of his hair out.
He come in and cut himself out of my life the day after, shaking his head and saying he couldn't think what the world was coming to. As near as I could make him, his idea was that the world was going to be swamped with young ones if something wasn't done about it, like using squirrel poison or gopher traps.
I felt like I wanted to cuff him up to a peak and knock the peak off; but I merely joked and said it was too bad his own folks hadn't come to think that way while he could still be handled easy. I also warned him it was going to be hard to find a job without more or less children on the outskirts, because ours was a growing state. He said there must be a few sane people left in the world. And, sure enough, he gets a job over to the Mortimers'—Uncle Henry and Aunt Mollie being past seventy and having nothing to distress Homer.
Of course the secret of this scoundrel's get-away from Idaho had got round the valley, making him a marked man. It was seen that he was a born flirt, but one who retained his native caution even at the most trying moments. Here and there in the valley was a hard-working widow that the right man could of consoled, and a few singles that would of listened to reason if properly approached; and by them it was said that Homer was a fiend for caution. He would act like one of them that simply won't take no for an answer—up to a certain point. He would seem to be going fur in merry banter, but never to words that the law could put any expensive construction on. He would ride round to different ranches and mingle at dances and picnics, and giggle and conduct himself like one doomed from the cradle to be woman's prey—but that was all.